We will use your email address only for sending you newsletters. Please see our Privacy Notice for details of your data protection rights.

Despite what David Cameron would have you believe, it is not about welfare benefits for EU migrants into the UK. What it is about is the simple proposition: Who governs Britain.

Really it is that simple. Should the UK be governed by her own citizens, or should it takes it orders from a crowd of unelected, and unaccountable technocrats based in Brussels?

Everything else is detail, important detail, but detail.

Over the past few years UKIP has focused on the issue of immigration not because immigration is in of itself a bad or good thing, but because while we are members of the European Union the immigration system of the UK is both out of control and skewed for reasons of EU politics rather than the needs of the United Kingdom.

And decisions that affect the fabric of our society and those who live within it are properly taken by those people and nobody else.

It is the very root and fundament of what we understand democracy to be and our membership of the European Union has made that term meaningless in so many aspects of public life.

GETTY

David Cameron was at last week's European Council meeting in Riga

So back to Dave and his caravan across the continent. The whole purpose of this trip to Copenhagen, Warsaw, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere and of course his statements prior to and during last week’s European Council meeting in Riga was all the same.

To set in people’s minds that the only thing we need to change about our membership of the European Union is to change the way in which EU migrants to these shores may, or may not receive welfare benefits.

We need to get a few facts straight about this in order see what a straw man it is as an argument.

And how much Cameron thinks that the people of this country are idiots, gulled by the most clearly signalled political sleight of hand since Gordon Brown tried to fool the gold market by telling it we were about to dump the nations reserves on the open market.

Only 65,000 EU migrants are on Jobseekers allowance, out of a total number of 1.1 million who have arrived in recent years, and out of a total of 1.84m unemployed.

The impact of low skilled (and the Migration advisory Committee have stated recently that 70 per cent of EU migrants are in low skilled work) is the impact of wages for those in our society who have it toughest.

Here studies show that the impact of EU migration has made hard lives harder. And those people whose lives have been made harder.

No, they haven’t been given a choice about the very thing that has this impact, and they cannot while we remain in the EU.

So it is not the issue of benefits that matters, it is not even the matter of immigration that must drive the referendum debate. But it’s the issue of who governs Britain.